Anti Vaping Hypocrisy

Timothy Birdnow

Rich Lowey takes on the anti vaping Nazis in a fine piece at Policico.

The Ridiculous Campaign Against Vaping

I won't excerpt a lot, but just give you a little taste:

About 11 million adults vape, and some percentage of them are former smokers or would be smoking in the absence of e-cigarettes. A robust study in the United Kingdom found that vaping is twice as effective as other common nicotine replacements in getting smokers to quit. The flavors, according to surveys of users, are a big draw for smokers quitting traditional cigarettes.

Anything that pushes e-cigarette users back into conventional smoking (now at a new low of 14 percent of adults) is bad for public health. It’s manifestly absurd to ban vaping products and leave cigarettes, including flavored cigarettes, on the market.

The fact that no smoke is produced and the water vapor is just laced with some flavorings and nicotine should have made anti-smoking zealots happy, but it did not. That tells us they were never about "second hand smoke" or even the public health, but had ulterior motives in the war on tobacco.

What were those motives?  I figured it out one time in a conversation with another student when I was in college. She argued "it is disgraceful that people are wasting farmland on TOBACCO when they could be growing food for the poor". It hit me then that that is precisely the objection; they see it as the duty of farmers to feed the hungry, not produce cash crops. And tobacco is so Western (even though the Holy Native Americans did it first).

So they don't mind smoking pot, but don't want people to vape. They also don't mind farmers wasting valuable cropland on corn to be used in biofuels.

The hypocrisy of the Left is astonishing. It is also astonishing to me that many of the more puritanical Christians are right on board with this stupidity; they see it as some hedonistic pleasure that should be stamped out. There were many zealots to be counted in the liberal Christian churches; I remember when a councilman in St. Louis County, a big fat fellow, was pushing a total smoking ban. He had to back down temporarily when a public outcry led to a packed house at the hearing. Strange; this fellow hated smoking on religious grounds, but had no problem weighing in at over three hundred pounds.

Look; I get it why people may hate smoking; it stinks up places and hangs on your clothes. But to deny someone the right to do it is wrong, just as it was wrong to deny, say, homosexuals from private behavior. If you oppose anti-sodomy laws, what right do you have to support anti-smoking laws?  Both activities are unhealthy.

But nobody ever lost any money betting against hypocrisy.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:35 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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